Something Human
by roulette rouge
Summary: After leaving the Citadel, Max comes across the body of a girl in the road...only to find that she isn't dead.
1. after

author's note?: so, i saw mad max: fury road. in a word - badass. as usual, tom hardy was a dreamboat, and i couldn't help but think about what sort of antics he'd get up to as soon as he got back on the road. so...this sprang up. voila! enjoy.

disclaimer - mad max and all his comrades belong to george miller. i'm just taking them out for a spin.

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He'd been driving for what seemed like hours – the emptiness out here stretched them, made them feel thin and quick like minutes - when he knew he had to stop.

In one smooth, rattlesnake motion he stomped hard on the brake and threw the gear into park. The transmission settled as he stared out at the mound of baking flesh lying a few feet out from the rusted out bumper - half coated in sand and more than likely dead. Why should he stop, why should he care? Before everything, he had forgotten how to care, but it brought old things back to him. The tyrant and his stolen wives, the woman who fled across the salt and back again to reclaim all that was good and green in the world for her own. She stirred up cooling embers. He forgot how much he hated the feeling of a fresh open wound.

Sighing, he killed the engine, and silence seeped in through the cracks in the window. It rattled listlessly in a wind so dry and hot it made his mouth water.

Voices rummaged through the absence of sound. Familiar, but not welcome. He closed his eyes against them, murmuring something like a prayer through thick, tightly pursed lips.

 _Max?_

 _Won't you help them?_

 _Max, you have to._

 _Help them...help them for us._

 _You couldn't help us -_

Moans of pain – his own. Pain that writhed under the skin, where he couldn't quite reach with dirty fingernails to scratch the ache away.

 _Max, you have to. You have to!_

The image of a little girl with eyes as rare and just as blue as water. She stretched out her pale bloodless hand to the body, pointing. Those eyes find him again...God, how they burrow in his soul.

He opened his own, the voices dying down as the wind picked back up. Grunting, he kicked the door open, palm jamming the rusty handle down so hard it nearly breaks off. The air was scorching, conspiring with the sun, and he remembered the book he found once next to a can of expired peaches. _Holy bible._ It spoke of hellfire, of lost souls, doomed to burn forever in the lake of fire. Out here, where the heat of the sand blistered his feet through the leather soles of his boots, he cannot help but think... _yes_. This must be the hell they spoke of in those ancient words. But where had they taken his soul?

The body lay a few feet ahead – ten steps, approximately, and his stride was long and quick like spider's legs. His heels punctured the sand, faster as the whispers weave in and out of his lumbering shadow. He grunted, swatting at their ghosts like flies, and knelt down beside the broken corpse.

At once they're quiet. Peace.

He grabbed the wrist, feeling around the shapes of green veins and fragile little bones – like a bird's, they're so small and so fragile – until he finds a pulse under the heel of the palm turned shiny with scars. It surprised him, those faint staccato drums throbbing against his fingertips. He did not expect to find a person, just the bag of skin left behind when death has dragged out everything that made it human.

Humming, he rocked back onto his heels, crouching there in the open with a living, breathing thing. He can see it now, just there, nothing more than a shift of tired lungs. It _is_ breathing. He took hold of his lip, testing the ragged edge of thumbnail between his teeth only to find there wasn't enough left to bite on.

 _Take her with you Max_

 _Take her._

 _Her._ Was it even female? The mass of dull clotted hair spread out like ink over the pale sand. It seemed small in stature, of course, but it could just as easily be a young boy or a man of slight build. He couldn't be sure it even had a face hiding in all that mess. Carefully, he reached out, parting the curtains of dreadlocks mottled with blood and sand, and _there –_ a nose. A white mouth slack in repose. The eyes were closed, lashes heavy and blanched with sand. Young, emaciated, but undoubtedly female.

He hummed again, this time in disapproval. Recent events had confirmed that females were nothing but trouble. Beautiful or not, strong or not, capable of handling weaponry twice their size or not – it did not matter to him. Well meaning, yes, perhaps, but trouble nonetheless. His own "wives", so called, had been the cause of the tyrant's ugly bitter end. He did not want to meet the same fate at the small, destructive hands of a woman. They were like cyclones caught up in tiny human cages.

 _Max…_

"No." He snapped his head toward the ghostly voice at this shoulder. "I've done enough."

 _You can't just leave her Max._

 _Can you Max?_

 _Can you really just leave her there to die? Die like a dog? Alone?_

 _Like you left us alone?_

He shook his head, violently, rattling putrid brains. Dust stirred from his scalp.

" _No_."

 _You can't just leave her._

She stared at him. Dead heavy eyes that sag with their weight. He stared back. Wishing. Wishing with something like a sob sticking in his throat that he would never ever see her again.

 _You have to, Max. You have to help her._

The body hadn't moved since he stopped, except to breathe. He can feel it now, the graze of every breath pushing weakly against the tide of sand and dust. They waft over the toe of his boots. Such a shame, he thinks.

 _We all must find a way...or we do not. We become dust._

And yet, he felt it just the same. A strange sensation, its potency like a poison in his blood. Could this be pity? The same that drove Furiosa to risk her own life for the sake of five blameless others?

She had given him seeds. They could soon become saplings if he tended them, let them bloom, stretch out their winding roots to find room. He had been shut off for so long. A desert of a man. Just sand and sky and nothing in between. He couldn't even remember what skin felt like in his hands. Her's had been soft, plush and yielding and oh so deliciously warm. And the sound of her voice. Echoing with the cries of those he carried with him, their rotting corpses tucked behind the raw edges of his eyes. She hadn't seem them. Their bloated white faces reflecting in his own. He kept them like the secrets that they were. Quiet. Away.

He made his own way - _h_ _is own -_ and that's why he left. That's why he was here, alone, like he'd practiced and like he'd learned. This was how it had to be. They knew that. He knew that. Why this walking corpse? She'd die anyway, someday...somehow. It was only a matter of time. Of _when._

But...her skin. Her voice. The company. His head rattled – _no, no no–_ beating down old urges that gnashed their hungry teeth in the pit of his stomach. _Need._ He learned to live with it - the solitude that became loneliness, the silence when the others slept. But it only made him miss their voices; they filled the void. They made him forget how truly empty this shallow grave of a planet had become.

He gathered the dead weight into his arms, throwing it like a sack over his shoulder. It didn't even shiver in response.

For a moment he stared out into the wasteland in front of him – the safe road, they once called it, when the three tyrant kings ruled with their weapons of water and bullets and gasoline. _Safety in numbers._ Now, who knew what was out there, far beyond the horizon? He meant to go as far as 160 days of gasoline could take him, like they'd said, like they'd planned. Make it on his own with what he could scavenge - like he always did.

But this dead weight. So heavy. Pulling him down into the sand…into the darkness that waited for him at the end of the road.

The whispers intensified until they filled him up.

 _You can't Max_

 _You can't let her_

 _Just die_

 _Like a dog_

 _Like you let us die_

He trudged on, dragging his feet and the body with him.

The voices were all but quiet as he sped off toward the sun.


	2. darkness and guilt

author's note: hi all. i'm SO sorry that it took this long to update. i got sick - really nasty sick - and it turned into bronchitis. i'm just now starting to feel better, but i wanted to update so bad. maybe i shouldn't be writing in this condition, but i couldn't help myself. sorry if it's terrible. until next time!

also, i just wanted to take the time to thank you all so much for your lovely reviews! they really made me happy, you have no idea, and i couldn't wait to get the next installment up for you. 3 3

disclaimer - mad max and all its characters belong to george miller. i'm just taking them out for a spin.

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The girl wakes with a scream.

" _Adam!"_

Eyes wild as they search their surroundings desperately, glassy and red in the firelight.

He watches her as she comes down from the sort of high that comes with the rush of adrenaline and fear. It turns humans to animals, reason to madness, and he's seen it before – in himself. The fire crackles and fills up the empty spaces between her shallow, heaving breaths. She looks around, settling back down into the sand as the adrenaline high cools in her seething blood. Her eyes lock on his, the focus shifting into place as she realizes she's not alone. The glassiness leave them and they're clear, their darkness sharper now. Big, round, like the moon shimmering behind heat waves.

"Who are you?" She rasps, like it's the first time she's used her voice in weeks. It's not a question, he realizes with a vigilant sort of amusement...but a demand. "Where am I? Where are you taking me?"

A talker. He doesn't care for those.

The makeshift spoon in his hand circles aimlessly (a broken piece of old carburetor he found a while back that was dull enough to put safely in his mouth). It sifts through the gruel as if hoping to find something better, more substantial than wet slop. His lips curl around the tightly locked gates of his teeth. He had learned to accept the quiet as a way of life. That the only sound he would ever hear were the ghosts themselves, echoes of his guilt bouncing around in the great big void. The last few days had been strange for him, full of the sounds of roaring engines and war cries and shrieking, cowering woman in the back of the rig. He had heard enough to last him a lifetime. Now, he wanted nothing more than to curl back up in the nothingness, where voices and engines and fighting did not exist. He wanted to smother in the blanket of it, let it make him forget there was anyone left in the world. That he was alone. Alone in the quiet.

But he is not alone, not anymore. The demons in his head had stopped their thrashing as soon as he'd thrown her lifeless body into the seat next to him. Somehow, taking this living, breathing, wilderness of a woman with him had quieted their blood lust – for now, their need had been sated, and now they waited. They still haunted him when he closed his eyes, just the same. The darkness in his head was their territory after all...and he was trespassing.

Without a word, he offers her the tin tray in his hand. She appraises it like a predator, hunger gnawing at the deep, angry shadows carved under the arch of her cheekbones. They look sharp to him, gleaming like knives in the glow of the blaze. Another scavenger, he guesses. Someone who walks alone and does not mind the stillness of the heat and the sand, but becomes one with it.

Quickly – a whiplash of a moment, and it's over before he blinks – she swipes it from his hands and dips her head into the soupy gray mush. The mass of dark hair hides her face like a tangled veil. He cannot help but watch, fascination worming through the holes in his head. This must be what he looks like to other human beings. Like a starved animal. A savage beast.

He is staring at the fire – the way it dances over blackened roots and twists through the dead hollows of wood – when she speaks again.

"Why are you helping me?"

He hums, shrugs once ( _who knows? not me, maybe them)_ , and runs his fingers against his temple over and over and over again, as if to appease the vengeful ghosts caged within. Truthfully, he doesn't know the answer himself. Why _did_ he take her?

When he doesn't answer and she realizes he has none to offer, she switches tactics immediately. "The rocks -" pointing behind him, to the vague shadows of the Citadel he's long since left behind. "I was trying to get to them. I was almost there when I ran out of water. That's all I need...water. I can find my own food. Part with some of yours and I'll go, I'll leave you for good."

He shakes his head. _Impossible,_ he smirks. "There's none."

She's still for a long time – maybe it's not so long at all, but feels that way out here in the darkness. Calculating. Wondering. And then she makes her move.

Three quick motions. One, two three. Hand to her waist. A flash of silver stained red like blood in the firelight, almost blinding him. Her arm is around his neck, the tip of the blade pressed against his pulse. She is fast, he realizes. He might be strong – built like a mountain, but a mountain is slow to move – but she is like water. And water, if he has learned anything in the last few days, is an efficient weapon.

Her thick, hot breath pools in his ear. "I find it hard to believe you."

"See for yourself. _"_

He gestures toward the Interceptor and she releases her grasp. He listens to her as she rifles through provisions with little interest, knowing that the only gun he keeps is tucked safely away into the secret layers of his jacket. It would be easy, he knew. To kill her. So very _simple_. He wouldn't even have to _think_ about it, the muscles in his hands remembering the shape of a gun so well that he wouldn't have to tell them what to do anymore. He's become good at killing without thinking. Snap a few delicate bones in her neck with one good hard twist and pull. Methodical. Clean. There wouldn't even have to be any blood..

 _Max,_

 _You must help her Max._

 _Help her for our sake._

His hand shake as they release him, their vice grip on his brain. Behind him, she's found the empty water canteen, shaking it violently once, twice, three times only to discover that he had not lied to her after all – empty. She throws it at his feet, the sand invading every seam and hole.

She spits at his boots, and he furrows his brow at the lump of saliva and brittle foam as it disappears into the dust beneath. "You are an _idiot_ to travel with no water."

"Water is there." He says, now pointing at the specter of fumes that hovers in the shadowy distance. Gastown.

She studies his face as he turns to look up at her.

He, in turn, learns the angles of her face. Young, but the heat and the cruelty of living in a dead world has made her old before her time. He can see it in her eyes. The bloated black corpse of her innocence that was burned away in the fire that destroyed them all. It's why he isn't afraid, isn't angry, not at all. Beneath the skin, deep down where blood and bone weave together like strings, they are the same.

She looks otherworldly to him now. The night behind her drapes over her shoulders and she looks like light pressed up against swollen darkness. Resolute, unbroken.

She's not like water at all, he realizes.

"You will take me with you. To Gastown."

She is _fire_.


End file.
